Two hundred feet of Spain, thirty minutes north, and I have never once got on the train.
Archer Milton Huntington assembled the core of this collection at the turn of the last century and set it down on a terrace of Beaux-Arts buildings above 155th Street, well north of where the city keeps its museums. More than eighteen thousand objects, from the Paleolithic to the twentieth century, and among the paintings a Goya of the Duchess of Alba, a Velázquez of a little girl, an El Greco, a Ribera, Sorollas. There is also, I am told, one of the finest holdings of Viceregal Latin American art in this country — the half of the collection that nobody photographs.
What I actually go for, when I finally go, is one room. Between 1912 and 1919 Joaquín Sorolla painted fourteen canvases on location across Spain — nearly twelve feet tall, some two hundred feet of picture end to end — and they hang together in a gallery on the west side of the building, renovated and reopened in 2010 when the paintings came home from a tour of Spain. It is called Vision of Spain, and both the painter and the man who commissioned it understood at the time that they were recording a country already, in Sorolla's phrase, on the point of disappearing. I do not know of another room in New York built to be one painting on four walls. I want to know whether standing inside it feels like a document or like a diorama, and I will not be able to tell you until I have.
Admission has always been free, which makes my failure to go the more embarrassing. The building has been working its way back open in stages, and at the time of writing visitors reach the ground floor only while the accessibility works continue upstairs; free tickets are reserved in advance. That is precisely why I would go now rather than wait for the finished thing. A museum halfway through reopening tells you what it thinks is essential. Spring, a Thursday, the 1 train to 157th Street and one block back down Broadway — and I intend to walk in through the terrace gates rather than arrive at a door, because the terrace is the argument for putting all this up here in the first place.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.